How to make your vacation stress-free: You need a vacation from vacation. We get more and more stressed about doing things and sharing them

That would be the healthiest starting point. But what happens is that we get the urge to ‘check’ our imaginary lists and we end up with more stress than a normal work day. And what is worse, with the feeling of, furthermore, not having arrived or not having enjoyed it. The phenomenon, which some have already dubbed frenetic vacations, is growing and is fed by the excess of information that reaches us whether we like it or not through all types of networks.

Before, when we saw Asian tourists, especially Japanese ones, take a photo in one place and run off to do the same thing in another, we would laugh. Now, we have become them. We have adopted that tourist profile. And the younger we are, the worse. «We don’t know how to prioritize and we think that vacations are the end of the world, that there is nothing else afterward. We want to include all the leisure that we do not enjoy daily in this period,” explains Xavier Montero, member of the Psychology of Organizations and Work Section of the Official College of Psychology of Catalonia.

Culture of failure

Although it cannot be generalized, there has always been a certain exhibitionist spirit when traveling,” explains Pablo Díaz, professor of Economics and Business Studies at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). In fact, our family photo albums are full of examples: what if the year we went to Punta Cana, what if our honeymoon trip to Japan, what if the image on the Chinese Wall…

What is happening now is that the phenomenon has worsened with the use (and abuse) of social networks. Every year it happens: someone gets injured trying to take the most spectacular photo in the most spectacular place in the world. As if being able to show it gave you a certain status and not having it was a failure. The culture of ‘postureo’, which has found a true vein on Instagram, has possessed us in periods like the current one.

“Technology and social networks have multiplied this effect,” says Díaz. And some people even feel obligated to do certain things: there is no Paris without the Eiffel Tower and no Rome without the Colosseum. And while you’re at it, what less than uploading it to Facebook, or Instagram, or putting it as your profile photo on WhatsApp. Or all because each place has its audience and you have to show that you make the most of your free time as the best. «It seems that on vacation if you don’t go somewhere you haven’t done anything. It’s a mistake. We have to value those other occupations that we have attended to: painting the house, reading a book…,” Montero warns. Or do nothing: “It’s funny, we underestimate the contemplative life and then we go to yoga, but since we pay for it, it fulfills the mental aspect of activity and calms that desire to do things,” continues the psychologist.

Photos of feet on the beach

Behind this pressure there would be two psychological phenomena. One is FOMO, (‘fear of missing out’), which is the fear of missing out on something and which is the same thing that some marketing techniques use to get our attention with slogans like “Don’t miss out”, “Whatever everyone searches”, etc.

The other is FOEN (‘fear of exhibiting nothing’), which is the fear of not teaching anything. It’s like we need someone else to give us their ‘like’ to validate our experience. The latter is suffered, above all, by the youngest. Already in 2017, a study by Expedia Inc., the largest online travel agency in the world at the time, found that Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1997) felt that privacy was overrated. Come on, they were cannon fodder for this frenetic and exhibitionist tourism.

Surely you have ever wondered why you see so many photos on social media of feet on the beach in summer. Just feet (some even ugly), sand and water. Nothing else. Psychopedagogue and UOC professor Sylvie Pérez is clear about it: “To show others that you are also on vacation and that you do things.” And what lies deep down is “the need not to feel displaced.”

It is also true that sometimes we are so involved in the wheel that we do not even realize that we are doing it or why we are doing it. Only upon returning from those days of rest do we realize that far from coming relaxed and smiling, we are exhausted and grumpy and not exactly because of the return. Who hasn’t ever said that ‘I need vacations from vacations’?

Hormone cocktail

Vacations give us pleasure, but it is not just a sensation, our brain undergoes changes and our body is transformed (and not because of the tapas and the little wines). The culprits for all this are the parasympathetic system and a series of substances that we release when we do pleasant things (endorphins, melatonin and serotonin), explain researchers Juan Pérez Fernández (University of Vigo) and Roberto de la Torre (Karolinska Institutet).

On vacation, all of them should have a party in our body. What happens is that sometimes we insist on doing so many things or fulfilling so many plans that they are overshadowed by other substances, also coming from our body, that stress us. They are adrenaline, noreprinephrine and cortisol and their mission is to activate a rapid response so that we escape from what is supposedly a danger to us, says Guillermo López Lluch, professor of Cellular Biology at the Pablo de Olavide University. And although stress per se is not bad, chronic stress (which haunts us in every activity day in and day out) is a “serious enemy” of our health. It must be avoided.

It may be difficult for us to put on the brakes in the office, but on our vacations we have to make the effort to make it that way. And to know that we are doing it right, we can put into practice the exercise that Pérez and De la Torre propose: «Take your pulse and at the same time take a good breath of air. Keep the. Our sympathetic system should cause our heart rate to increase. If vacations do their job, when you take that breath, the parasympathetic system should act and make us quickly return to a normal heart rate level. If this is not the case, it is time to stop and review all our resolutions for the sake of our own physiological balance.